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Comment by mr_overalls | Hacker News Reader

> intent of the framers

The Framers were not omniscient, and the Constitution isn't a religious text. They allowed slavery, forbid women to vote, and held an 18th-century understanding of economics and science. While their design philosophy for our government is good to consider, we are not beholden to them to implement as they would have wished.

The most successful nations today - in terms of population health, happiness, and well-being - are Western European countries with strong social safety nets.

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> The Framers were not omniscient, and the Constitution isn't a religious text.

Sure, but this is the text we have. If you don’t like what it creates, change it, there is a procedure to add amendments or change the whole thing altogether. Of course, the difficulty then is that quite a lot of people in fact like what we have and want to keep it this way.

And there is nothing in that text that prohibits establishing a real social safety net with protections for workers. “Just amend it if you don’t like it” is a straw man in this context.

I'd put fair odds on the entire package falling under the Commerce Clause, given that it could be argued to be fundamentally all about keeping the economy running something like normally through large disease outbreaks.

Well, not anymore, now that Supreme Courts decided that the federal government can do whatever it wants. Originally though, the authors of the constitution, and the convention, had a very clear idea and very clear limits on what federal government can do, in fact enumerating those things. Social safety net is not one the enumerated list of things government can do, and the constitution would never have passed in the first place if the convention members had thought it is.

What happened however was that the Supreme Court decided that the enumerated clauses are irrelevant, and that government can do whatever it wants, just saying magic words of "general welfare" and "interstate commerce". That's why there's no interest in passing amendments anymore: why bother when you can just get Supreme Court to stamp whatever you want?

I'm not against having federal social safety net, but I'd prefer it to be passed the way founders intended, and how things used to be done before the Progressive era in Supreme Court: by expanding the enumerated list of things government can do, through constitutional amendment. What I don't like is having it passed through the Supreme Court backdoor, by interpreting the constitution literally opposite to what it was intended and commonly understood to mean when it was written.

Again, there is nothing prohibiting the establishment of a social safety net in the constitution. What you have said here is just building another strawman next to the first one.

There is nothing allowing it either, and the clear intent of the writers was to not allow the government to do anything that was not explicitly enumerated on the list of things it is allowed to do. This is laid out clearly in last few sections of Federalist 41.

>This is laid out clearly in last few sections of Federalist 41.

It doesn't matter what the Federalist papers say, as far as the Constitution is concerned, since the Federalist papers are not a body of law.

The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution reads as follows: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Powers not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution and also not prohibited by the States are not prohibited by the Constitution. The states can literally, and perfectly legally, vote to grant the government additional powers as they deem necessary, without holding a Constitutional congress and ratifying new amendments each time.

> It doesn't matter what the Federalist papers say, as far as the Constitution is concerned, since the Federalist papers are not a body of law.

No, in fact it matters very much when the question is what the writers of the Constitution meant and intended.

> The states can literally, and perfectly legally, vote to grant the government additional powers as they deem necessary, without holding a Constitutional congress and ratifying new amendments each time.

Sure, the States can vote themselves social welfare, or anything else that the Constitution doesn't prohibit. You could have California Social Security with no constitutional issues at all. That is clear. It's the federal government that cannot do so -- or at least cannot under the obvious and intended reading of the constitution.

>No, in fact it matters very much when the question is what the writers of the Constitution meant and intended.

The writers of the Constitution were not unanimous in their beliefs - the Constitution was a compromise of principles, not a statement of absolute consensus. You're simply declaring the authors whose opinions you agree with to be correct.

James Madison himself opposed versions of the tenth Amendment limiting the Federal government to only the expressly enumerated powers, quoting from Wikipedia here: "James Madison opposed the amendments, stating that "it was impossible to confine a Government to the exercise of express powers; there must necessarily be admitted powers by implication, unless the Constitution descended to recount every minutia."[0]

>It's the federal government that cannot do so -- or at least cannot under the obvious and intended reading of the constitution.

Yes, the Federal government can do so through Congress. The only powers the Federal government is forbidden from exercising are those not enumerated in the Constitution and any others forbidden by the states. Nowhere in the Constitution are the states prohibited from granting powers to the Federal government - which you yourself conceded earlier. Indeed, it would contradict the Tenth Amendment and other parts of the Constitution[1] to claim that states don't have that authority.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_powers

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